New York Jewish Film Festival 2016

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Welcome to the 25th edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival, the preeminent showcase for groundbreaking films exploring the diversity of the Jewish experience around the world, co-presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. This year’s festival features a wonderful lineup of narratives, documentaries, and shorts, including world, U.S., and New York premieres, a retrospective of film highlights from the past 25 years, a poster exhibition, and other special programming in honor of our silver jubilee.

Don’t miss this year’s NYJFF Artist Focus with video artist Omer Fast on March 31 at the Jewish Museum. Fast will screen his 2012 short film Continuity, followed by a conversation with Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Jewish Museum.

Selection Committee:This year’s New York Jewish Film Festival was selected by Florence Almozini, Associate Director of Programming, Film Society of Lincoln Center; Rachel Chanoff, THE OFFICE performing arts + film; Jaron Gandelman, Curatorial Assistant for Media, Jewish Museum and Coordinator, New York Jewish Film Festival; Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, Jewish Museum and Curator for Special Programs, New York Jewish Film Festival; Dennis Lim, Director of Programming, Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Aviva Weintraub, Associate Curator, Jewish Museum and Director, New York Jewish Film Festival.

Funders:The New York Jewish Film Festival is made possible by the Martin and Doris Payson Fund for Film and Media. Generous support is provided by Mimi and Barry Alperin, The Liman Foundation, Sara and Axel Schupf, Monica and Andrew Weinberg, a gift in memory of Max Weintraub, and through public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional funding is provided by the Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in New York.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center receives additional support for the New York Jewish Film Festival from the Jack & Pearl Resnick Foundation.

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The 25th annual New York Jewish Film Festival, co-presented by the Jewish Museum, features world, U.S., and New York premieres of films from around the globe, a retrospective of highlights from the past 25 years, plus other special programming in honor of our silver jubilee.

Don't miss this year's NYJFF Artist Focus with video artist Omer Fast on March 31 at the Jewish Museum. Fast will screen his 2012 short film Continuity, followed by a conversation with Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Jewish Museum.

Rescheduled Screenings

In the Jewish area of Moldavanka in Odessa, local gangster king Benya Krik rules with an iron fist. When the Russian Revolution begins, the local commissioner attempts to put Krik’s gang to work as a revolutionary regiment, and Krik ultimately finds himself ensnared in a Bolshevik trap where mystery and intrigue ensue.

Hot Sugar’s Cold World is a fly-on-the-wall portrait of Nick Koenig, a New York–based record producer who works under the name Hot Sugar. After his girlfriend, the rapper Kitty, goes on tour and they break up, Koenig heads to Paris, where he stays in the apartment of his late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

Main Slate

Yared Zeleke’s remarkable feature—the Ethiopian entry for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar—tells the story of a young boy who is sent to live among distant relatives after his mother’s death and his touching friendship with a sheep.

Based on Amos Oz’s international best seller, Natalie Portman’s feature debut as a writer and director recounts the time Oz spent with his mother, Fania (played by Portman), who struggles with raising her son in Jerusalem at the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel.

One of New York’s great Renaissance men, Isaiah Sheffer left an indelible mark on music, theater, television, and culture across three decades in the Big Apple. Art and Heart: The World of Isaiah Sheffer celebrates his life through interviews with Morgan Freeman, Stephen Colbert, Leonard Nimoy, and many others. Screening with: The Man Who Shot Hollywood (Barry Avrich, 12m).

Living with his mother, brother, and 11-year-old daughter on a run-down housing estate in Israel, Shlomi Ben Zaken confronts a series of difficult decisions. Efrat Corem’s remarkable debut feature is a sensitive and austere portrait of a father and family attempting to redefine themselves against all odds.

Carvalho’s Journey tells the story of Solomon Nunes Carvalho, an explorer and artist who photographed the American West during the mid-19th century. His experience as a Jew on the Western trail was unprecedented, and his photography beautifully captures cultural exchanges in the era of Manifest Destiny.

In 1989, as the Soviet Union was collapsing and giving rise to the perestroika reform movement, Russian film historian Naum Kleiman founded the Moscow State Central Cinema Museum. Cinema: A Public Affair charts the rise and fall of the museum under Kleiman’s legendary leadership.

Hot Sugar’s Cold World is a fly-on-the-wall portrait of Nick Koenig, a New York–based record producer who works under the name Hot Sugar. After his girlfriend, the rapper Kitty, goes on tour and they break up, Koenig heads to Paris, where he stays in the apartment of his late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

Gabriel Lictmann’s zany caper about betrayal and revenge, follows a young Jewish lawyer and avid consumer of detective novels who falls for a woman he meets in a café. The morning after the two go home together, he wakes up to find that she, and his financial savings, are gone.

From Brussels to Tel Aviv, Paris to New York, the late experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman traced a worldwide path of rugged avant-garde and political art. The new documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman dives into the 40-film oeuvre of the Jewish Belgian pioneer.

In the fall of 1974, the French health minister Simone Veil was in charge of a daunting task: to pass a law legalizing abortion in France. This riveting courtroom drama follows Auschwitz survivor Veil (a brilliant Emmanuelle Devos) in her heroic battle on behalf of her country’s women. Screening with: Period. New Paragraph. (Sarah Kramer, 14m).

Q&A with David Bezmozgis and actress Sasha Gordon at select screenings

Mark Berman is the son of Russian immigrants and a typical teenager: hormone-fueled, mischievous, and prone to slacking. One fateful summer, he falls for his uncle’s fiancée’s daughter, Natasha, and a forbidden summer romance begins. Based on the director’s award-winning book Natasha and Other Stories.

In 1945, the U.S. government commissioned a team of idealistic filmmakers to create 26 short propaganda documentaries about life in the United States. Projections of America covers the creation and dissemination of these works, capturing both the optimism and the messiness of American democracy. Screening with The Autobiography of a Jeep (Irving Lerner, 9m).

In July 1945, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin convened in Berlin to negotiate the aftermath of World War II. To break the ice in these tense discussions, Truman requested a private performance by the young virtuoso violinist Stuart Canin, who recalls the performance in this short documentary.

This exceptional Ukrainian feature begins with the blossoming of simple childhood love in a shtetl in 1905. Shimek and Buzya forge a blissful bond, but Shimek leaves it behind to seek a life outside his father’s house. Song of Songs is a poignant tale of love, return, and the transience of youth.

Set against the glorious backdrop of autumnal New York, Joey Kuhn’s feature debut about a young Upper East Side painter who’s spent much of his life in unrequited love with his best friend, a charismatic and reckless partier living alone in his family’s townhouse, vividly depicts a social circle in crisis.

The daughter of Jewish Croats who fought the Nazis alongside Tito, Adriana Altaras leads a normal, if frazzled, domestic existence in Berlin. When her parents die, she inherits their apartment and discovers a gold mine of letters and photographs revealing family secrets, persecution, and political heroism. This documentary was based on Altaras’s best-selling autobiography.

When Hagit, a young woman with a mild mental deficiency who works in a toilet-paper factory and lives with her mother, embarks on her first romantic relationship, she keeps it a secret from her overbearing mom (Asi Levi, winner of the Best Actress prize at the 2015 Jerusalem Film Festival).

NYJFF at 25: A Retrospective

In the Jewish area of Moldavanka in Odessa, local gangster king Benya Krik rules with an iron fist. When the Russian Revolution begins, the local commissioner attempts to put Krik’s gang to work as a revolutionary regiment, and Krik ultimately finds himself ensnared in a Bolshevik trap where mystery and intrigue ensue.

The Castle is the unfinished, final novel by Franz Kafka, arguably the 20th century’s most influential Jewish writer. With extraordinary fidelity to Kafka’s original language and tone, Austrian director Michael Haneke masterfully evokes the writer’s vision of a dystopian society hobbled by paperwork and bled dry by conformism and convolution.

Andrzej Wajda’s adaptation of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s short story Holy Week surveys the relationship between Polish Christians and Polish Jews during World War II through the story of a Jewish woman who seeks sanctuary with a former boyfriend on the Christian side of the city as the Warsaw Ghetto burns.

The 20-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors studies philosophy and lives a bohemian existence in Antwerp. When she takes a job as a nanny for a Hasidic family, she befriends the devout mother, which forces her to reevaluate the Jewish faith.

A Jewish twentysomething in Buenos Aires has left his architectural studies, resigned to wander through a rundown shopping mall where his mother runs a lingerie shop. In hopes of a fresh start, he decides to move to Poland, and asks his grandmother, ex-girlfriend, and rabbi for help.

Mahler on the Couch is a portrait of the great composer Gustav Mahler and his tempestuous relationship with his wife, Alma. Chafing under an agreement to give up her own musical ambitions, Alma begins an extramarital affair, as Mahler consults with Sigmund Freud on matters of creativity and passion.

Acclaimed New York filmmaker Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of this poignant documentary, a cinematic biography that finds both humor and pathos in the swirl of conflicts and affections that bind father and son. Screening with Intimate Stranger (Alan Berliner, 60m).

The late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman brings us an intellectual comedy about a mother and daughter who find themselves living together for the first time in decades. Charlotte, a freelance writer, invites her recently widowed mother to live in her apartment, and the ensuing clutter becomes a source of tension and family antics.

Spoiler alert! These pivotal moments from 10 films presented at previous editions of the New York Jewish Film Festival highlight a wide array of themes and life lessons with fluctuating degrees of fate, heroism, and self-determination.

Guest Selects: Todd Solondz

Todd Solondz’s celebrated black comedy follows junior-high geek Dawn “Weinerdog” Weiner through the many dark corners of suburban youth. Bitterly funny and true to life, the film launched Solondz’s career, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and is now hailed as a classic of modern independent cinema. Screening with: Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 32m).

Talking Movies

A collection of New York’s finest film curators and programmers (Thomas Beard, Stuart Comer, Chrissie Iles, Dennis Lim) come together to jump-start a discussion (moderated by Jens Hoffmann) about engaging film audiences in the 21st century. With festivals, museums, galleries, and online platforms all presenting film in new and different ways, the medium finds itself at an exciting crossroads.

Alan Berliner’s ability to combine experimental cinema and artistic purpose has made him one of the most acclaimed independent filmmakers in the United States. In this unique master class, Berliner will discuss his use of sound and image metaphors in Intimate Stranger (1991) and Nobody’s Business (1996), both of which are screening in the festival. The lecture will include a presentation of several clips from each film.

Please honor the maximum of 4 tickets per screening at the Member rate. Please be prepared to present your Film Society of Lincoln Center or Jewish Museum membership card when purchasing in person or redeeming online ticket orders at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s box offices.

For free events, go to the page on the website for the free screening or event and click on the showtime to reserve a complimentary ticket. One ticket per person, and as a reminder, you must log-in to your user account. Please note: Reservations are limited and subject to availability. Tickets can be picked up from the Film Center box office on the day of the event. Reservations will be held until 15 minutes before the show is scheduled to begin, therefore some standby seating may become available, at which time tickets will be released on a first come first serve basis. Note: advance tickets for the HAPPY ENDS loop in the Amphitheater are not required.

Tickets

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The Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates American and international cinema, to recognize and support new filmmakers, and to enhance awareness, accessibility and understanding of the art among a broad and diverse film going audience.